


turning slowly (away from the moon)

by obfuscatress



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), SPECTRE (2015)
Genre: Dark, Dr Madeleine Swann in the way i imagined her, Fix-It, Gen, an ode to the gloriously insane Mr White, and i favour the reactants, i need to stop abusing my little poetry collection like this, or rather his legacy, really amped up on the angst with this one, reverse friends to lovers because relationships are an equilibrium reaction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-22
Updated: 2015-11-22
Packaged: 2018-05-02 20:26:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5262311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/obfuscatress/pseuds/obfuscatress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She finally understands why her father used to sit on the bench outside, smoking cigarettes for hours on end in the dark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	turning slowly (away from the moon)

**Author's Note:**

> For Essi: my metaphorical mother, guide to Shakespearean drama, and the light of my life. This is absolute fuckery and I apologise for none of it. Shoutout to the amazing isthisrubble for betaing this and general cheerleading.
> 
> Let it be known that I don't actually speak French and everything in this fic has been either researched or translated via Google translate through a meticulous cross referencing system spanning four different languages. Translation can be found in the end notes. Please let me know, if there's any mistakes.

**1.**

The floorboards in his flat are pure ice against the soles of her bare feet, brand new and lifeless beneath her weight like this life they’re trying to carve out for themselves and she wonders whether it will ever work out. Two months gone (the heart of winter now, nothing like the Hoffler Klinik though) and still she pushes around heaps of yellowing files, catching sentences here and there, hand written notes jammed under an ugly porcelain bulldog on the coffee table. Madeleine gets the sense this is all there is to his history: dust and lies and secrets all around and not a single thing more.

 

**2.**

There’s a spot in the mattress - hidden by the wafts of stale sweat and expensive cologne - that smells of gunpowder. She finds it one night, when James flees the sheets from the grasps of his nightmares, and she noses into his space to find only bitterness. It is, she realises, where he used to keep his gun. Before. And still the ghost of it lives on; she sees reflexively slip of his hand towards it whenever he wakes, because old habits die hard and they’re all too used to death by now.

Evidently haunted, he clatters about in the kitchen looking for his favourite whisky and she rolls onto her back in bed with a sigh, too tired to pry the drink from his hands and far too alert to fall asleep again. It’s barely living, but it isn’t dying, and she’s finally beginning to understand why her father used to sit on the bench outside, smoking cigarettes for hours on end in the dark. Her eyes water dangerously with sorrow ungrieved as she holds her breath, blinking back tears.

Beside her, the mattress dips and she turns away from him, back into the confines of her own space. “Are you alright?” she asks into the darkness and she’s not sure whether it’s meant for him or herself.

“Yes, just needed a glass of water. Go back to sleep.”

His voice is tense and her body rigid under the weight of lies stacked upon lies, even if they are the ordinary kind.  _ I love you,  _ she’d said and maybe that was a lie too _.  _

This, she decides, is not how she wants to live. 

 

**3.**

She takes him to Paris on the cusp of spring, her life packed in a suitcase in the trunk of the Aston and the grime of London slipping past her one last time. Maybe she’ll come visit. Maybe she’ll forget all about the place. Who could blame her?

Nothing but bleak days and haunting memories of rope burns in the making, wrists cut, explosives tied to her feet, and a helicopter burning bright as a meteorite plummeting from the sky. Perhaps James will leave too, one day, when he’s ready, though it won’t be for her. No, they’ve run their course and he’s made enough sacrifices for her just as she’s given him her all in return: body and soul fed to a hound for his loyalty.

 

**4.**

Sorbonne out of the windows of Le Lapin Blanc is no longer the place she remembers: the air too cold, too stale, and the voices on the street too shrill, babbling in rapid fire French that sounds a tad off key to her. Paris was bound to change, rationally she knows that, and yet.

She closes the window and goes to sit on a white bed in a white room in this blank life that doesn’t feel like it’s hers (yet) and wonders what she wants to make out of it. Tracing the pastel pattern on the overthrow she thinks back to Tangier. Sheer white curtains and rough linen sheets against her skin as she wriggles her way out of a dress half asleep, unsure she’ll survive to see another day. And long before that - three years old - clinging to the ornamented balcony railing, an ancient colonist city unfolding beneath her to merge with the sea, the world wide open for her.

Then, later again, Bond, tearing apart the few happy years of her life, hole in the wall revealing ever more dust and deceit. And James sitting amid the rubble with the unwavering devotion of an old guard dog bereaved of its master.

He doesn’t belong here, with her. He belongs in a time gone by. James Bond is an artifact, a shadow, a spectre of the past, and all life is willing to treat him to anymore is a honorable death.

“This is the end, isn’t it?” he asks, perfectly calm. He’s been reading people for too long not to have seen this coming and her throat tightens at the thought of all the promises he’s been trying to keep for her. The civilian life he so carelessly put on hold twenty years ago is no longer there and, unlike her, he’s forgotten how to root himself into the beginnings of one and grow out of his own ashes.

“Yes,” she says with some remorse even though she accepted the outcome weeks ago.

“What now?”

“We crawl back into the shadows.”

“So it all comes to nothing.”

“ On n'apprend pas aux vieux singes à faire des grimaces _.” _

She smiles the only smile she has left these days: a parting of her lips just wide enough to bare her incisors, innocent white against blood red. 

This is just another goodbye. A whisper in her ear, tearing her from a dream like the voice of her mother telling her she’ll be late for school if she keeps dozing. An illusion torn to shreds in the face of reality, but in her memories, Maman’s smile is a brilliant white and James Bond’s eyes an even more dazzling blue. In that moment she thinks she really does love him, but in her own particular way that is best acted out at a distance.

 

**5.**

The train to Geneva is packed with people murmuring in Swiss German and their very own, tilted brand of French. In the midst of it, Dr Madeleine Swann stands by herself with her suitcase wedged between her thigh and the compartment wall. It’s just like that first time she left home: a quiet optimism seeping into her soul despite the fact that her parents were getting a divorce. It’s just like seeing the glass panes of the Hoffler clinic for the first time: knowing she’d live life in the narrow space of invisibility she’d made her own in the thirty odd years of living in the footsteps of an assassin.

She finds work at a clinic in Lausanne fixing people who are painfully self aware of the mildly deranged ways in which they fall off the rails time and time again. She tapes her diagnoses on little cassettes and plays them back in the quaint space of her minuscule living room, writing reports clean on paper with a glass of wine for company. It’s been like this for years: just her, all alone in the big bad world, dissecting other people’s neuroses. 

She sits back at her desk with a sigh and thinks of the Christmas she finally realised her father was going insane. Seven years ago, the two of them up in the run down old house in the alps where the wind crept in through the cracks in the walls, whistling in the dark. She remembers the gooseflesh rising on her calves from the creak of the stair and the exact moment she spotted the light under the mirror. Secret doors to hide secret lives - her father illuminated in the eerie light of a dozen monitors and nausea finding a permanent home in the pit of her stomach.

“Madeleine.”

"Qu'est ce que c'est?"

“Je peux t'expliquer. Madeleine.”

And why had she not fronted him out instead of slamming the bedroom door in his face, yelling at him over the sound of his fists on the wood as she wrenched her suitcase open and started throwing all her things into it at random. It hadn’t even been a proper fight, just curse words and raised voices, her making off in the middle of the night, disowning him for a fourth and final time.

The last word she ever uttered at him remains ‘bastard’ and he’d died up there in solitude, for her, their last unfinished game of chess sitting untouched in the drawing room.

It must still sit there, she realises; _he_ must still sit there - at that soot and dust covered table with the imprint of a gun and the track of a ring slid across the board - dead with his face tilted up towards heaven in a last prayer for forgiveness. She wonders whether James closed his eyes when it happened or whether he’d looked at her father like she’d looked at him when he asked her to, narrowly missing witnessing her father’s suicide.   

 

**6.**

A knock on her door in the dead of night and Madeleine wakes to the vile cold of February with her heart scrambling into her throat. She kicks her way out of a tangle of sheets, the digits on her alarm clock materialise as 04:35.

Another knock, blunter this time, like a palm banging against the door with urgency and the sound of a familiar voice. “Madeleine!”

She tears the door open, palms sweaty from the adrenalin rush kicking in, and James tips inwards, off balance, over the threshold, and she can tell he’s been drinking.

“James,” she blurts, eyebrows pinching together in confusion. Their arms reach automatically for one another’s, bodies still old friends. “What are you doing here?”

“Have you seen the news?”

“Not since last night. W-”

He tears himself from her grip and stalks into the flat with an unnerving sense of purpose. Madeleine notices a smear of blood on her forearm as she shuts the door, and of course he’d show up out of the blue bleeding all over the fucking place. He finds the remote on the kitchen table - a testament to her lonely dinners - and fumbles with it to turn on the telly.

She rips it from his hands, getting angry. “James,” she says impatiently, “look at me. What is this nonsense?”

Her irritation dies away at the silent desperation in his eyes, something screaming ‘please, trust me’ and she’s taken back to Blofeld’s desert hub with her father’s figure mirrored across every screen and James Bond brought to his knees, begging her to save herself from what was about to happen. She sucks in a breath, because she can almost hear the sound of the gunshot and somewhere in the back of her mind the memory of Blofeld’s manic grin forces itself onto the surface. She’d trusted him then and he’d been right, so she gives in to him now too.

The television screen turns on with a static sound and there’s the instant background sound of sirens accompanied by images of flames and rubble, sounds of human desperation drowned by a reporter. A terrorist attack in Berlin, two more in Paris, and a fourth in London. An image of half of Whitehall’s right wing crumbling into the Thames and next to it the newly restored bridge deformed by Blofeld’s helicopter a year ago.

“Merde.”

“Shit, indeed.” He rubs a hand across his face, tired of having the country he’s given his life for defaced again.

“You think it is them?”

“I’ve not a clue.” He shakes his head in resignation. “I haven’t gotten one  _ bloody _ clue. Someone else has dealt with the aftermath of SPECTRE: Tanner, or Q perhaps. And I-”

“James,” Madeleine takes a step closer, instinctively reaching for his hand. “Listen, this is not your fault.”

“She sent me after them and here they are again.” Haunted look, the smell of scotch wafting off of him. Madeleine almost feels sorry for him.

“You are not responsible for fighting all the evil in the world single handedly. You are no more than a man in the face of endless chaos. Besides, you are bleeding.”

He glances at the split skin over his knuckles, blood trickling down his fingers, gash on the side of his hand. Still desensitised to pain then, Madeleine notes and points him to the sofa while she fetches the first aid kit from under the kitchen sink with shaking hands. There’s a bottle of bleach right next to it and for a split second she is nine years old again, clasping her clammy hands around a Beretta. 

She pulls out the medical kit and slams the cupboard door shut defiantly, the words ‘ _ you’re not responsible _ ’ echoing in her mind. In the living room, James turns down the volume on the news, eyes darting around impatiently.

“If it is vodka you are looking for, I don’t have any.”

“Shame,” he says drily and she can’t tell anymore whether he’s serious or not.

Madeleine hums noncommittally and clicks the plastic case open on the coffee table to reveal rolls of gauze, tiny flasks or various colours, and a needle she doesn’t care to get acquainted with. “Hold out your arm, please.”

James obliges and she dabs it with disinfectant that primarily reeks of rubbing alcohol. He hisses, staring at his wounds like they’re on someone else’s body even though the pain is his. 

“Hold still,” she instructs even though she doesn’t need to, pressing a clean dressing onto his skin as she tries to unravel a roll of gauze with the other. She knows better than to ask what happened, recalling their night at L’Americain: her waking frightened to him punching through the wall.

She wraps the gauze around his hand, stretching it over skin and scars, and she remembers the way they felt against the flesh of her hips without longing. Her and James, they had merely been - how had Papa put it? - two kites dancing in a hurricane; bound to be airborne for a moment at most, and it’s a miracle they managed to stick to together at all, let alone for months after. It was better this way though: kind words and kind touches in a broken world littered with shards.

“Merci,” he says, humoring her. He flexes his fingers experimentally as she rocks back on her haunches, muttering a half-forgotten  _ ‘de rien’ _ .

“You know,” she says and swallows audibly, “when I was little my father often read me his favourite poem before bed.” She doesn’t know where the sentimentality is welling up from, only that she wants to say something kind to him, distract him. “I cannot recall what it was called, but when he was finished, he’d quote something else at me: ‘Madeleine, life is death’s other kingdom and thine is the kingdom.’”

“Eliot. ‘Eyes I dare not meet in dreams, in death’s dream kingdom.’”

“Oui, précisément. It is just-” She licks her lips with the thought only just materialising to be grasped in full, “I never realised what he meant by it, that he already had one foot in the grave, when I was born. I always assumed he had made that choice later and therefore took it as a personal slight. But all he lived for anymore - killed for - was me, the only cause he considered worth living for. Perhaps… perhaps some people aren’t meant to have desk jobs and nice, quaint lives. Perhaps some people need to shoulder the bullet rain and retaliate the hellfire for the rest of humanity to live and breathe in freedom. Despite what my father did for a living, no matter how twisted and immoral, I never stopped loving him in my own way. SPECTRE, MI6. They’ve wreaked havoc across the world in their own ways, but then titans often do.”

She pauses, clasps her hands together. Takes a deep breath under his watchful gaze.

“I am grateful you kept your promise to save my life, but I meant what I told you when we left the safe house. The truth is, I am not meant for that sort of life; I belong in the light. And you are a creature of the shadows, an attack dog made for the battlefront.”

“What happened to ‘when given every other option’?”

“Like you said: perhaps you never had a choice.” Madeleine rises to her feet, standing above him with an amused smile creeping onto her face, “Besides, you would have made an awful priest.”

He laughs at that and her heart warms at the sight. “Thank you,” James says earnestly. Madeleine shrugs. This is what they can do for one another, fix and heal what life insists on tearing.

“What are friends for?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“That makes two of us then.” Madeleine closes the first aid kit and tucks it under her arm. “You are welcome to have the sofa for tonight. Shall I get you a blanket?”

James nods, another thank you getting caught in his throat. “I’ll be off before you wake though.”

“Of course. It is the  _ nostalgie de la boue _ calling, after all _. _ ”

“I’ll send you a postcard.”

 

**7.**

Dr Madeleine Swann lives her life as she always intended to: with absolute devotion to herself, waltzing through the cobblestone streets of an old city in a bright dress.

She writes an esteemed article on  _ trouble de stress post-traumatique _ and cuts it out of the journal to hang in a frame on the living room wall. On a whim, she indulges the young man in the opposite office by agreeing to a single date. She joins the rest of her co-workers for the occasional drink, smiling at the way they argue about  the garbage disposal schedule with passion.

And when she goes home to find her solace in the quiet of her flat, there’s a vibrant postcard tucked between the bills on her doormat. Madeleine tacks it onto the the fridge with the rest of them and searches for the Maldives on the paper map of the entire globe she’s taped to the wall. She commemorates the spot with a red dot, a date, and draws a line from Chittagong in pencil. Somewhere, someone is gone, and in his shadow lives another man, who writes her little arbitrary truths from his life of lies.

_ Les tueurs, les menteurs. _

_ Partout. _

**Author's Note:**

>  **1.** Title from Carol Ann Duffy’s poem _Words, Wide Night._
> 
> **2.** _Le Lapin Blanc_ \- the white hare - is a hotel near Sorbonne, which, as the name suggests, is mostly decorated in white and the lightest of pastels. It seemed rather fitting for Madeleine here.
> 
> **3.** “On n'apprend pas aux vieux singes à faire des grimaces.” French saying (lit. ‘You cannot teach old monkeys to make faces’) which is considered equivalent of the english version: “You can’t teach old dogs new tricks.”
> 
> **4.** Madeleine's exchange with her father:  
>  "Qu'est ce que c'est?" What is this?  
> “Je peux t'expliquer. Madeleine.” I can explain. Madeleine.
> 
> **5.** The “Eliot poem” refers to T.S. Eliot’s _Hollow Men._
> 
> **6.** “Nostalgie de la boue” French expression (lit. a yearning for the mud) which refers ‘to a person’s fondness for cruel, crude, depraved, or humiliating things.’
> 
> **7.** Madeleine's lines from the movie, which I used as the final lines: To liars, to killers. Everywhere.
> 
>  
> 
> You can find me on tumblr at: obfuscatress.tumblr.com. Alternatively I've got a twitter @shippress. Both will have fic updates.


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